Mark Zuckerberg's Houses: Palo Alto, Kauai, Lake Tahoe, and the San Francisco House He Sold

Mark Zuckerberg's home base is a cluster of houses in Crescent Park, a Palo Alto neighborhood where he bought one house in 2011 and, by the New York Times's count in August 2025, at least 10 more around it. Beyond it, the Meta chief executive holds Ko'olau Ranch on the north shore of Kauai, which grew past 2,000 acres in 2025, and two adjoining lakefront estates on Lake Tahoe's West Shore. The house he kept in San Francisco's Dolores Heights for nearly 10 years was sold in July 2022.

Each of those places has had a public fight over what he built: a review board vote in Palo Alto, lawsuits over family land on Kauai, a demolition approval at Tahoe, months of construction complaints in San Francisco. We follow them through city transcripts, county tax rolls and permit files, and the reporting that read them. Street numbers stay out, for the reasons in our guide to celebrity addresses.

Start in Palo Alto. Fortune in August 2025 and Palo Alto Weekly at the turn of 2026 both described the Crescent Park house as his primary residence, and it is mapped as Mark Zuckerberg's Palo Alto home profile.

Palo Alto: one house, then the block around it

He bought the house in 2011 for $7M, Forbes reported that May. How old it is depends on which report you read. The Almanac, the local paper that covered the sale, described an older house remodeled and expanded over the years. Forbes said a physician had razed it and rebuilt it in 1903. Until a building record settles it, we give no build year.

The neighbors' houses came next. Between December 2012 and October 2013 he paid more than $30M for the four houses around his, CNBC reported, and leased them back to the people living in them. That figure covers those four houses only. Robb Report's figure of more than $43M measures something else: everything he owned in Palo Alto at that point, his own house included.

In 2016 he asked the city to let him tear the four down and build new houses in their place. The request went to Palo Alto's Architectural Review Board, the panel that weighs the design of new buildings before the planning director makes the call. On September 15, 2016, the board voted three to one to recommend denial. Its transcript names four LLCs and an architecture firm as the applicants, not Zuckerberg, and Fortune and the Palo Alto Daily Post later tied those companies to him. CBS San Francisco reported the board's reasoning the next day: the proposed houses were not designed for families, which is what the city wants for the neighborhood.

He went smaller instead. The applicant withdrew and came back with separate, smaller projects that did not need the board's review, Palo Alto Weekly reported, and Fortune and the Daily Post say two of the houses were replaced with single-story homes. By August 2025 the New York Times counted three houses demolished and rebuilt smaller, one heavily remodeled, swimming pools filled in to make a central garden, and 56 city permits across eight years of construction.

The buying resumed. Six more houses came after 2022, the Times reported, four of them in the 15 months before its story, with bids as high as $14.5M for a single house. The paper put his spending on the block above $110M. Palo Alto Weekly's figure was more than $100M for at least 11 homes.

The city tried to answer it once. In December 2025 Vice Mayor Greer Stone and Council Member Keith Reckdahl asked for rules aimed at anyone who buys three or more houses close together: a parking plan for long jobs, a 24-month limit on construction, a 36-month pause before the next project, and the right for neighbors to sue, Palo Alto Weekly reported. On April 13, 2026, the council turned the plan down, the Palo Alto Daily Post reported, and agreed to look at rules for construction and empty houses across the whole city.

Kauai: Ko'olau Ranch, from 700 acres to about 2,300

His first Kauai land came in 2014: roughly 700 acres on the island's north shore near Kilauea, for about $100M, CBS San Francisco reported, citing Forbes. It combined a beach parcel at Pila'a with the 357-acre Kahu'aina Plantation, once planted in sugarcane, and WIRED dates the first of the deals to August 2014.

Two years later a six-foot lava-rock wall went up along the road, and people who walked or biked past lost their view of the ocean, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and WIRED reported.

Then came the lawsuits. Inside the ranch sat about a dozen kuleana, small plots that Native Hawaiian families had handed down for generations, often with no formal deed. Hawaiian law lets every descendant inherit a share, so hundreds of people held slivers of these parcels, along with the right to cross the land around them to reach them, WIRED explained. On December 30, 2016, Zuckerberg's companies filed eight quiet-title actions against more than 100 of those people, The Garden Island reported. A quiet-title suit asks a court to settle who owns a piece of land. Here it would have pushed the descendants to sell their shares or bid for the land at auction.

The suits became public in January 2017, and the backlash was fast. That month Zuckerberg wrote in The Garden Island that he was “dropping our quiet title actions and will work together with the community on a new approach.” The legal fight went on anyway. The descendant with the largest share carried the suit forward, and in June 2017 Zuckerberg's company switched from plaintiff to defendant, which still let it bid, Honolulu Civil Beat reported. It kept buying shares: more than $450,000 across 71 transactions from 2016 to 2018, lifting its stake from 24.1 percent to 43.9 percent, according to property records The Guardian reviewed, as WIRED relayed them. At the June 2019 auction for the four remaining parcels, that same descendant won the land for more than $2.1M, both WIRED and Gizmodo reported.

By December 2023 WIRED counted about 1,400 acres, held through what it called 10 or so shell companies, and described the construction from planning documents it obtained through a series of public-records requests. More than a dozen buildings stood partly finished. At the center were two mansions whose combined floor area WIRED compared to a professional football field, joined by a tunnel to an underground shelter. The building permits put the main construction at around $100M, on top of about $170M in land, and WIRED called that likely an underestimate.

None of it went through a public hearing. On Kauai a large private project triggers public review when it sits inside a Special Management Area, a protected coastal zone, and the county's planning director told WIRED the ranch's buildings fall outside it. That is why the fullest public account of the compound comes from document requests, not a county meeting.

Zuckerberg called the shelter “like a basement,” Fortune reported in January 2024. His spokesperson told WIRED that less than one percent of the land is developed, with most of it given to farming, ranching, conservation, and wildlife, and that the family views Ko'olau Ranch as its home.

The ranch kept growing. In July 2025 WIRED reported a 962-acre purchase near Pila'a for $65M, his largest on the island, which took his Kauai holdings from about 1,400 acres to about 2,300, according to The Inertia's account of that report. The same reporting found at least two Native Hawaiian graves on the land, belonging to a local family's great-grandmother and her brother, and state officials told the magazine more were likely nearby, Straight Arrow News and The Inertia reported. The reporter, Guthrie Scrimgeour, told Hawaii Public Radio that total spending was probably over $300M by then. Fortune's count in July 2026 was the same: at least 2,300 acres.

The county's own tax roll shows only a slice of that. Kauai County's assessment records, as of September 2026, show 15 parcels under a single company, about 346 acres by our count of their legal descriptions, every one classed agricultural. That class matters to the tax bill: WIRED noted the land gets a substantial agricultural tax discount. The parcels we checked do not show the rest.

Lake Tahoe: two West Shore estates, one teardown

In December 2018 an LLC paid $22M for a lakefront estate in Tahoe City, on the lake's California side, and the next month it paid $37M for the larger estate next door. The agents signed nondisclosure agreements, and the buyer's name stayed out of the news until The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2019 that it was Zuckerberg, as HousingWire relayed.

Both estates came with names. The smaller one is Carousel, and its Tudor-style main house dated to the early 1930s, Variety reported, and HousingWire's account of the Journal story puts it at about 1930. The larger one is Brushwood. The adventure novelist Stewart Edward White bought that land in the 1920s, named it after a Rudyard Kipling story, and spent summers writing there in yurts with canvas walls, according to the Tahoe Daily Tribune.

Building anything on that shore needs the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which regulates development around the whole lake, on the California and Nevada sides alike. A 2022 letter from the agency cleared Zuckerberg's LLC to tear down Carousel, Business Insider reported, and by June 2024 The San Francisco Standard said its 1930s buildings were gone. The plans the Standard read keep Brushwood's main house and a cottage and add eight structures, among them an L-shaped family house and a lakeside spa.

The parcel data agrees with the Standard. The 2026 Placer County assessor figures that the planning agency publishes carry no construction year for the Carousel lot, and both lakefront lots still share one owner's mailing address. Zuckerberg owns both.

San Francisco: the Dolores Heights house, sold in 2022

San Francisco's assessor dates the house to 1928. Zuckerberg's purchase was recorded on November 14, 2012, for about $10M, a figure Architectural Digest and Newsweek both report. One line in the city's building file predates him: an application for a greenhouse, filed in January 2012, 10 months before he bought, and later cancelled. Newsweek's 2022 sale story still counted a greenhouse among his additions.

His own renovation shows up in permits filed from January 2013 to August 2015: a seismic upgrade, additions at the rear and side, fire sprinklers, and a slate roof and brick front redone to match the originals. A 2014 permit made the top floor legal living space, and the assessor's roll for 2014 counts one more story than the year before.

On the street it was a long job. By September 2014 the work had run 17 months with nearly 50 workers, CBS San Francisco reported, and neighbors complained of jackhammers on Saturday mornings and four or five parking spaces held for crews.

He sold the Dolores Heights house off-market in July 2022 to a Delaware LLC for $31M. For a while that made it the priciest house sale in San Francisco that year, until a $34.5M purchase in the Gold Coast neighborhood passed it, The San Francisco Standard reported.